Is there an Erfa shortage currently - or does my Canadian pharmacy just not want to send me anymore (my prescription is for 30mg mg times a day, but I actually take 30mg *5* times a day separated apart by 1.5-2 hours - my psychiatrist who wrote the prescription is fine with that, but the pharmacy might not be..
I've read other places that there apparently is an Erfa shortage - which is worrisome. Does anyone else make "pre-2009 Armour" anymore?
I'm in the US, if that makes any difference.
I struggled to obtain my ERFA ndt last time which is worrying. I was told it might be because of Brexit! But you won’t be affected by that over in the states. Let us know how you get on sourcing it.
As I understand, Erfa is actually manufactured in Spain - not north America.
Which leaves an open question as to where they source the desiccated thyroid powder. I put forward the possibility that some, or all, of it could be sourced from the UK. If so, then brexit could quite clearly have an impact. And any such impact could already have started.
(I actually suspect, as I posted recently, that Denmark could be a, or the, source. But I have absolutely no real information.)
Isn’t it more likely that all of the NDT manufacturers used to source their porcine thyroid extract from China and now they can’t? This might shed some light on what’s happening... thecompounder.com/2019/05/0...
Definitely not what we have been told.
RLC (Nature-Throid and WP Thyroid) expressly state theirs comes from USA and Canada sources.
There used to be one supplier of USA desiccated thyroid and they supplied (so far as we knew) Armour, RLC and NP. That was USA sourced.
More recently the USA Westminster product had a recall - that was Chinese sourced. Interestingly, no other USA product was recalled which suggests none of the others use Chinese manufacturers - or at least means they use a different manufacturer.
If it is all imported, that suggests an awful lot of USA porcine thyroids not going into tablets!
And Biofac, the Danish company, must be selling their product to someone. 
Good to know. Thanks for posting that.
I read the article you linked to again and it is peculiar.
I wonder what percentage of porcine thyroids go into desiccated thyroid (by country or around the world)? Unless it is a pretty substantial proportion, then changes to total numbers might not make that big a difference. It could simply be a case of increasing the percentage that go to desiccated thyroid - to keep the quantity the same.
But the article seems to be very heavily in favour of the compounding pharmacies producing synthetic T4:T3 products - sometimes with the same ratio as desiccated thyroid. Trouble with that is that synthetic and desiccated thyroid products seems to work differently.
Does anyone here know what *else* other than T4 and T3 (and a small bit of T2 - is there a T1?) is contained in porcine thyroid?
I assume that as it is literally "ground up thyroid gland", it should also contain various other thing found in thyroid gland cells. Various enzymes involved in making T3, de-iodinases for making the "small" amount of T3.
A dash of selenium from the deiodinases, and maybe a few selenocysteine tRNAs that didn't get used. Thyroid binding protein(s). And anything else that thyroid-gland cells produce. I'm sure there are proteins and hormones that do things we just don't know about yet. Or maybe it's an enzyme or something and so we do know, but naively (and arrogantly) assume that "of *course* it couldn't be a ligand, just like we thought "it's a darn *sugar* molecule - of COURSE it can't be a signal.. And then we learn otherwise,
“Cracking the sugar code: Why the "glycome" is the next big thing in health and medicine.” Salon (September 2018; salon.com/2018/09/04/cracki...
“The sugar code: Why glycans are so important.” Gabius, Biosystems 2018
( ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/287... )
[ Edited by admin to add a space between the parentheses and the link so that it becomes clickable. ]
Shall we all share our experiences to see how we get on obtaining erfa natural hormone? I’m due to see my private endo end of sept and will need a script then for natural thyroid. I really hope I can get the drug as it has changed my life and after ten years I feel amazing - almost 100%!
question to those currently or previously on Erfa
ERFA THYROID SUPPLY
consultant has changed me from Armour to ERFA ? 
No Erfa thyroid on NHS?
